Everyone is drawing different lessons from the defeat of Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman in his Democratic primary at the hands of the unknown millionaire Ned Lamont. The anti-war blogosphere and the liberal left are cock-a-hoop, claiming it was the 15,000 new Democrats they persuaded to register who provided the margin of victory. Lieberman himself, who is running again in November as an independent, reckons he neglected his home base, and has now persuaded his veteran local political co-ordinator Sherry Brown to come out of retirement and help him win it back. Brown's view is that had the campaign lasted one more week, Lieberman could have won it, thanks in part to the new security scare that swept the country after the London terrorism plot. "My defeat is being taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up those planes in this plot hatched in England," Lieberman told his supporters when he vowed to fight as an independent. Brown could be right; the latest state polls from the Rasmussen group show Lieberman beating Ned Lamont by 46-41 in November.
Lieberman's chums in the Bush administration agree that their fears of defeat in the November mid-term elections have been much eased by the reminder of all those bad guys out there wanting to blow up American civilians. The White House's Karl Rove, who was one of the first to call Lieberman with a personal message of condolence, is salivating over the list of usual liberal suspects—Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, George Soros—who funded the Lamont campaign. Expect a strong Republican attack on the lefty peacenik Arab-lovers, starting on the 9/11 anniversary.
The lesson that most Democrats take from the Lieberman defeat is that a) you had better have a very good website and blog strategy, and b) anybody who continues to back the Iraq war is toast. Hillary agrees with the first, and has hired Peter Daou, John Kerry's old internet expert, to run her web campaign. But the second lesson she takes from Lieberman's defeat is that Lamont got away with a very vague anti-war stance, so Democrats may not need to provide specific dates for troop withdrawals. But Hillary draws a clear distinction between this year's November elections, when the Dems can run against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war, and the big one for the presidency in 2008. She thinks 2008 will be much tougher, when Bush and his team are no longer on the ticket, most troops are home from Iraq, and the terror attacks still keep coming.
Playing the race card
Rule one of the Texan Republican handbook says that when the next election looks grim, play the race card. It was what George Bush senior did in 1988 when the Democratic presidential nominee, Mike Dukakis, had a 17-point lead after his convention. It collapsed as Bush launched his blitz of television ads featuring the black convict Willy Horton, who raped again when out on parole thanks to the liberal Massachusetts parole laws. That was the ploy of Lee Atwater, Bush's campaign strategist, and Atwater's spiritual heir Karl Rove is at it again, in an attempt to fend off a Democratic surge that threatens to win back the House of Representatives. The Republicans have commissioned a series of awful warning television ads that point out that a Democratic win in November will make Harlem's gravel-voiced Charles Rangel the chairman of the all-powerful ways and means committee, and put Detroit's John Conyers into the chair of the house judiciary committee. Rangel and Conyers are black Korean war veterans who hard-scrabbled their way through law school and have been congressmen for 36 and 40 years respectively. They are on the left, as American politicians go, and Conyers has called for President Bush's impeachment, but these dignified elderly gentlemen are hardly firebrands. Just so it does not look too obviously racist, the Republican campaign will also target a white Jew, Harry Waxman, from the affluent west side of Los Angeles. If the Democrats win control of the house, Waxman could be chairman of either the commerce or the health and environment committees—a prospect that hits a lot of right-wing buttons. Of course, officially, the Republican campaign will be more high-minded. Republican national committee spokesman Brian Jones, when asked on Good Morning America how the party plans to hold the House and Senate in November, said it would run local rather than national campaigns, and argue that a Democratic congress will raise taxes, "cut and run" in Iraq and launch impeachment proceedings against Bush.
The really fiendish aspect of Karl Rove's strategy is that it not only rallies Republican voters but also divides the Democrats, many of them more than a little nervous of being portrayed as a party that puts the nation's legislation into the hands of left-wing blacks. Nancy Pelosi, a California liberal and Democrat leader in the house, has suggested that just because the old seniority rules have traditionally meant that congressional veterans like Rangel and Conyers should get the powerful chairman seat on the committees, that does not necessarily mean that they will. This has outraged the Congressional Black Caucus, worried lots of liberals, and confirmed to the gleeful Republicans that their ploy is working. So now they are also targeting Pelosi as a dangerous wild-eyed liberal who is unsound on national security and therefore unfit to lead the House.
